Little Jewel Quilts

Monday, September 25, 2017

Do you remember this quilt? I just love it but it has been sorely neglected. :(

I honestly thought that I had already blogged about quilting it and getting it to the binding stage but it appears that I didn't. Well, I did get the quilting done way back when and I love the way it turned out. I had started working on the binding and after getting several inches done it just sat in a lonely pile and stared at me waiting to be finished.

During the day I worked on En Provence and I finished making the rest of the magenta/neutral triangle-in-a-square units. I also sewed all of the purple 4 patches together and even got some pressed open.

This morning I had planned on going to my exercise class but wouldn't you know it...when I rolled out of bed I hurt my knee!!! It's quite ridiculous that it happened but I think I need to put a platform on the floor beside my bed. We replaced our mattress and box spring a couple weeks ago and it is so high that I feel like the princess and the pea trying to climb up and down from my bed. I am quite short, only 5' tall, and the top of the mattress is 28" off the floor. Anyway, the end result is that my knee hurts when I go up or down the stairs. :(

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Autumn has arrived and I guess it is a good time to 'fall' back into blogging. I have really been quite neglectful in documenting my quilting journey over the past few months but that is because I really haven't been doing a lot of quilting. Like many others, one of the main reasons that I started blogging was to keep a diary of my quilting but this summer I have spent more time on other projects so I haven't really had a lot to write about!

This past week I spent a few days on retreat at Killbear Provincial Park with a great bunch of quilting friends. It is a beautiful park near Parry Sound, Ontario and it is about a 2.5 hour drive north from where I live. We stayed in the staff house and we had such a great time together and I actually got some sewing done. I didn't get anything finished but I did get a good start on Bonnie Hunter's Old Tobacco Road and En Provence. Both quilts are 4 patch heavy and I spent quite a lot of time making 4 patches and pinwheels. There was a lot of socializing and chatting and carrying on and, well, there was some wine involved too. :) Really, the perfect setting to do a bunch of mindless sewing and it worked out quite well for me!

I got at least 403 four patches made for both quilts and I think I am just about all four patched out! I also got all of the pinwheels made for Old Tobacco Road and I got a good start on the magenta/neutral triangle-in-a-square blocks for En Provence. I feel pretty good about my progress!

One thing I have discovered since my last post is that Pic Monkey is no longer a free program for photo editing. I was able to use a substitute program that was preloaded on my laptop when I replaced it last year but it seems to be more complicated for me to figure out. Oh well, I am sure with time and practice I will get better at it so that it doesn't take me so long to get two photos cropped!

Saturday, July 8, 2017

Wow....time is just flying by! I have finally finished the second flimsy using leftovers from my 'Delightful' baby quilt that I last posted about. I think it looks good and it will look even better once I do the quilting.

I think I was just a little too casual in my approach of making and then sewing the flying geese into columns. From a distance it may not be as noticeable but my geese don't line up horizontally. I don't really mind too much though. :)

My goal in making this flimsy was to use up as many of the leftover larger pieces of fabric as well as the scrappy bits and pieces from the first quilt. I certainly did achieve that goal but I also needed to add a bit more of some of the fabrics in order to do it. In particular I needed more of the plain blue fabric because I didn't have enough of the waste triangle corners to make the amount of flying geese needed. Luckily for me I do have ready access to more of this fabric. ;)

I still have these leftover cut off triangles and I plan to stitch them together and add them to some of the remaining fabric hunks and chunks to make the backing. We will see how that turns out....

Monday, June 26, 2017

I have been working on a couple quilts lately and I am totally in love with this one. It is a baby/toddler quilt and it is just delightful!!

I have already quilted it and it is just waiting for me to hand stitch the binding to the back and I can't wait to get going on that finishing touch.

This is what it looked liked on my design wall. Every time I looked at it while in-progress I just couldn't stop smiling. The pattern is from Missouri Star Quilt Co. and it features charm packs but I used yardage instead.

The instructions are to use the stitch and flip method to make the snowballed pinwheels and you could double sew the corners before trimming but I didn't do that. Instead I just cut them off but I used a consistent seam allowance so that all of my cut-off triangles turned out the same size. Of course, I didn't want to waste them so I started a twin to this quilt. ;) My crumb and string bins are so overflowing that I just want to avoid adding to them if at all possible and I can't throw away perfectly good fabric!

Using up the blue stitch and flip triangles

flying geese

It is not an identical twin but I wanted to use up all of the bits and pieces and extra hunks and chunks of leftover fabric. This could be a never-ending project!!!

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Tomorrow is the last official Guild meeting for the season and it is going to be a really fun one! We have the usual social sew in the morning and then we will have a potluck lunch afterward. At this meeting all of the participants in the Pizza Box Challenge will submit their final boxes. Each participant will have their name entered into a draw and we will each go home with one of the boxes. The boxes contain nine blocks that are relevant to the theme for each particular box and many of the blocks are very creative and quite beautiful.

I just finished making my block (I know...I am always last minute!) and I think it turned out really cute. I got the paper-piecing pattern from here - such a great resource. The theme of my box this month was 'What is your Game?' and as you can see I chose Pacman.

As an extra this month, we were required to baste all of the blocks in the box together so that they can be hung up during the meeting and all of the members can see how creative each of the participants were with their blocks.

On another note, I have been working away on my crumb quilt and am making some progress. It does take quite a bit of time to make crumb blocks. It also seems to take a lot of time to make the stitch and flip sections as well. I have been double sewing the corners to make bonus triangles but I don't think they are all turning out the same size. :( In any case I am sure I will be able to find a way to use them up as well.

Saturday, May 20, 2017

I enjoy baking and I often make my own bread and my family really enjoys my efforts most of the time. ;)

I have been wanting to make sourdough bread but I didn't have any starter and I wasn't feeling confident about making my own. I mentioned it to my son's girl friend at one time or other and for Mother's Day she gave me some lovely bubbly sourdough starter. She had started a batch for herself on April 3 and she generously shared it with me. :)

I am a little nervous about whether I can keep the starter going but so far so good. I received the starter on Thursday and I put it in the fridge because I had no recipes ready to make with it. When you use sourdough starter you do have to feed it on a daily basis but if you keep it in the fridge you don't have to feed it as often. It's not a problem other than you end up discarding some perfectly good starter during the feeding process. I didn't want to waste it so I found this recipe to use it up instead of throwing it away. Anyway, long story short is that these dinner rolls turned out great. I can't stop eating them.....

I don't think I am ready to make a sourdough bread without yeast yet so I will be making this bread tomorrow. As long as you keep feeding the starter it keeps giving so I just may be baking sourdough everything for the rest of my life! lol

Thursday, May 18, 2017

For the past few weeks my design wall has been a wall of crumb blocks. Over the past year I have been wanting to spend more time working on crumb quilts and I have finally got myself in gear to move forward with it. These strips are 2.5" x 8.5" and I have been trying to decide how to use them. I have ideas to use them as sashing strips, joining them together to create complete blocks, stacking them into long columns with long strips between them. You get the idea...there are so many ways that they can be used but I was waiting for some real inspiration to strike.

Yesterday, I had two friends over for a sew day. Vangie, Rosalie and I were chatting and sewing and Rosalie passed around a book from Missouri Star Quilt Co. and she pointed out a coin quilt that she liked called Kissing Coins. Well, let me tell you I gobbled up her idea right away and started plotting to make a quilt using this layout but instead of single fabric coins I would substitute crumb blocks.

During our sewing time together I got at least 15 crumb strips made but I do seem to spend more time chatting than working. :) I added them to the stack that I already had waiting for trimming. It really doesn't take too long to trim and depaper these strips and I love how they look - so worth the effort!

I did a little test to see if I could use these strips that I already had made. I trimmed a few of them to 5" and it would work but I think that I will just start making a bunch of strips that are 2.5" x 5" specifically for this project. Honestly, I have enough crumbs waiting to be used. I have a huge bin full and it is always growing!

Thanks to Rosalie and Vangie for such a great sewing day! It is so much fun to spend time together sharing ideas and resources as well as working out design ideas and plans for our quilts and other adventures. I am looking forward to the next sew day!